Remote work is a sticky concept.  Bosses may prefer to have people under direct supervision in the office, but the masses have voted with their feet and headed home.  Tokyo commutes are a shocker.  Crowded trains, standing squashed up against total strangers for long hours is not something anyone looks forward to and being able to ditch all of that and stay home instead sounds much better. There is a need for in-person teamwork and finding the balance between remote days and days in the office is a hot topic at the moment and will continue to be so. 

Internal and external meetings will need to be conducted remotely.  We are entering the hybrid world where some of the team are in the same office meeting room and everyone else is at home connecting remotely.  This will spill over to meetings with clients.  Japan is always a country where there is a surprising number of people required for the meeting on the client side.  I can’t count the number of times when there was just me on one side of the table and host of people on the other, with me wondering why are there so many required for this meeting?  That will continue in the remote world and in the hybrid meeting world too.

This presents a number of problems.  Engaging our audiences online and in the room are both difficult thanks to the technology.  When groups gather in a room for the meeting, there is normally one camera to cover all.  There are some tools available like the Owl which uses multiple cameras covering 360 degrees, to show who is speaking on the screen for those who are remote.  This is good, but there is a limit to its effectiveness, because it suits small groups gathered in a U-shape.  Sound is the issue here.  Usually there are one or two of those UFO looking microphones on the desk to pick up the audio and in my experience they are never quite satisfactory.  It is also very frustrating when those in the room react to an unintelligible remark and start laughing, while those beaming in remotely have no clue what is going on.  This really divides the group into first and second class citizens very quickly.

The other problem, which despite everyone working with the technology for the last number of years, is that few people still understand how to use the camera.  In a meeting room with one shared camera it is difficult, because the distance to the people speaking is quite far and with a wide shot, we don’t feel any connection with them.  The Owl and similar technology can help, but I haven’t seen too many firms bothering to use it when they already have installed one camera at the front of the room.

For those joining remotely, they invariably fail to look at the camera at all and are looking down at the faces on the screen.  This is understandable, because we are trained to look at people faces and this is where all the body language information is located. Unfortunately, we are not looking at the people though, because our eyes are downcast.  We are looking at the middle of the screen, rather than at the green dot, which is where the camera is located on the top of the laptop.  When we ignore the people’s faces on screen and talk directly to the green dot, we are now engaging directly with the audience because they see us looking straight at them.  For the speaker though, it is not very satisfying, because there is no sense of strong personal bond between us and the audience faces on screen, so we feel disconnected.

To add to the already heightened degree of difficulty, when we introduce slides, the speaker becomes this person trapped in a tiny little box on the screen. We cannot really see them very well, so the personal relationship is lost.  Normally when we are presenting, our face, voice and gestures are critical to being persuasive, but when virtual we are robbed of two of the elements. We only have our voice to work with.  Sadly, very few people understand the importance of how to use modulation, pauses and speed control for emphasis when speaking. Take note next time you hear people giving a talk or in a virtual meeting.   The tendency is to put the same amount of speed and strength behind every word.  Boring and often monotonous.

In fact, we need to use pauses more in the remote world, to allow people the people listening to follow what we are saying.  Also, we purposely hit key words with more power and this is a must, if we want to lift certain key words in the understanding of our audience.  This is not a word democracy. Not every word has the same value in a sentence. Most people who are not trained properly give each word gets the same emphasis treatment, so there is no differentiation.

Do we really need to have the slides up all of the time? If we can stop sharing the screen as often as possible and present ourselves in full screen mode that is best.  Yes, that may mean a bit of switching between getting the slide deck up again and alternating between it and ourselves, but this is the way for us to have more impact.  Being on full screen allows us to employ gestures, however limited and also to make the best use of our facial expressions.  These are very powerful in driving home our point and communicating our message.

Having the camera at eye height would seem to be an obvious thing, but I still see so many people just resting the laptop on the table in front of them.  Why shooting up one’s nose is thought to be professional or attractive is a mystery to me, but a lot of people have zero self-awareness and continue to make this most basic of mistakes. We want to get that camera at eye height, so we can make it easier to ignore what is going on in the main screen and just engage each person directly through the camera.  

If people don’t work these things out, we will all be treated to desultory presentations for the remainder of our working careers.  That thought sends a shiver up my spine, I can tell you. Or can we all get back to the understanding that this remote medium has its own idiosyncrasies and we have to master them, because this medium isn’t going away. 

I hope they can come up with a technology solution that give us the type of effect you can have with a teleprompter, where you can be looking straight at the camera in the middle of the screen, rather than just the green dot, which is mounted at the top. That would help us all to be better able to engage the people on screen with great eye contact and improve our communication effectiveness.  Until the technology catches up, let’s get to work on what we can control and be a professional when in person and when beaming in virtually. 

I teach presentation skills to businesspeople.  In the first class they do a simple self-introduction and this is where we instructors can tell the skill level of the people in the class.  A recent class had quite competent people and I am sure they would have been seen as already quite good by their peers and bosses.  At the end of the class on the next day, they were transformed into a completely different, highly persuasive and skilled presenter.  I was thinking what was the difference?  They were by all measures fairly good when they arrived into the class.  The obvious answer was the coaching they received, but why did that make such a major difference and can we get better at presenting by ourselves without coaching?

There are books on presenting and I have written one called “Japan Presentation’s Mastery” and there are millions of others.  There are tons of videos on presenting and I release two a week, one called “The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show” which covers leadership, sales and presenting.  The other show is called the “Japan Business Mastery Show” and it covers the same content, but in a more abbreviated version for people with no time.  There are no doubt a lot of podcasts on the subject and I release this one “The Presentations Japan Series” every week.  What I am saying is there are no shortage of resources on how to become a better presenter and I am doing my best to create content for Japan as my niche.

If you absorb all the content available there is no doubt you will become a better presenter.  But will it make you a great presenter?  To become great, I believe you need two things – lots of presenting opportunities and quality coaching from experts.  I forget which Tony Robbins book it was I was reading, but I remember he made the conscious decision to do as much presenting as he could, in order to master the art.  I thought that made sense and I certainly grabbed every opportunity after I came back to Japan to work in 1992 to give presentations. 

Things have gone quiet since Covid, as there were no events, but still I am up to presentation number 548.  I tried to incorporate what I was studying into my talks and also to note what was working for me and what was not.  Over three decades I have built up the experience now to be very comfortable speaking and presenting.  My TED talk last year did push me though, because it is very short at 13 minutes and the video goes global. If you are doing a poor job, a lot of people know about it. I also don’t count my presentations given as a corporate trainer, because that is not a public speech style presentation and has a different goal and cadence.  It is still standing up in front of people and commanding the room though, but it is different, so I don’t count the many thousands of those facilitations.

What about the coaching aspect?  The coach provides options.  We know what we know, but the coach can see more than what we can see.  When you think about it you are facing the audience and looking at them and you cannot see yourself, unless you are videoing the talk (and I strongly recommend you do that every possible chance).  The coach can see the impact we are having and can help us to ramp that up.

It might be more voice variety and modulation.  It might be larger gestures.  I might be to start moving around or to stand on the one spot and not move.  It might be to get us working on engaging our audience members through using eye contact and holding their gaze as we speak to them. 

It might be to inject pauses to slow things down.  If we are nervous or even if we are on a roll, we might be speeding up.  When this happens, each successive wave of ideas wipes out the previous one and the audience can get a bit lost trying to keep up.  The pauses allow them to digest what we are saying and get them ready for the next pearls of wisdom.  They also allow us to adjust our speaking speed and slow down. 

The coach can mention to us that we have a very serious look on our face, because we are concentrating so hard and it comes across as aggressive or angry and that isn’t the image we want to project.  We don’t notice we are doing that because we are consumed with the message and the delivery and are oblivious to the how we look to the audience.

The coach can also encourage us to take some risks.  They can suggest things which are outside our usual gamut, but which when incorporated will enable us to lift our presentation to a higher height than we could imagine by ourselves.  Sometimes we need to stretch ourselves so that we can make a bigger action in the talk and have it within the bounds of business relevancy.  The coach can help us to escape from our Comfort Zone and challenge us to be more and be better.

My recommendation is to absorb as much knowledge and information as you can about presenting, get as much frequent practice as you can manage and get a quality coach.  That is the winning combination.  Remember we are all putting out personal and professional brands out there every time we open our mouths to speak.  Do we want to be perceived as true professionals and in that way build trust and credibility?  Of course we do, so that is why this trifecta is such a winner.

This Japanese saying the “frog in the well doesn't know the ocean” is a favourite.  When I think about its application to presenting, one of the issues we face is we are all living in small wells.  We go the same conferences or events and the people presenting are rather homogeneous and so the bar gets set pretty low, because they usually are not very good.  Without understanding the process, our expectations are getting conditioned to mediocrity. 

When we are growing up, we are usually not exposed to great speakers.  High School teachers are unexciting speakers. Politicians on television are normally underwhelming, doing their best to avoid answering the questions or recommending anything too strategic, in case there is an electoral backlash.  They are all looking for the middle of the middle.  Our professors at Uni do a lot of public speaking, except you would never know that judging by how they deliver their lectures.  The speakers invited to the degree graduation ceremony are normally dull dogs.  When we get into business, we rarely encounter much professionalism around presenting. It is field of frogs croaking in their wells.

A few decades of this and you are done.  If we want to lift our game, increase our persuasion power, we need to get out of the well and start exploring the ocean.  Persuasion power is absolutely required.  The amount of data and information coming at all of us on a daily basis is staggering.  Traditional media and social media are conspiring to drown us with sheer volume. How do we cut through all of that dross and white noise and register with our audience when it is our turn to communicate? We need to be crafting our messages using storytelling and backing it up with solid and relevant data.  Just a big data dump, no matter how good the data is, won’t cut it anymore.  Audiences today have micro-concentration spans and also way too many options to escape from us.  If we are just reproducing the same old same old from decades ago, we are kidding ourselves.  The good news is it is all getting better for us.

What is amazing today is how easy it is to expose ourselves to the best speakers.  Content marketing requires that we all put our goods up on display so that potential buyers can see how good we are and if we have what they want.  This means it is all out there for free to sample.  YouTube and other platforms allow us to search out content we are interested in and find people who are knowledgeable and within that group find out the top communicators to follow. Search engines can help us to locate content from people who we know are renowned skilled speakers and we can usually access their talks easily and for free.  TED talks vary of course in quality and the format is rather limited to short presentations of under 15 minutes.  There are just so many available though, with a bit of searching, we can find the best content.  In our local areas there will be a broad number of organisations sponsoring talks. In Tokyo there are a number of Chambers of Commerce which are running talks all of the time.  If you are a Rotarian like me, then at least once a week, you are listening to a speech by some notable.

So, we have a cornucopia of options to observe and learn.  Now we hit the main barrier.  Having the ability to access the ocean and doing anything about it though, are different things.  We just keep in our lane and we don’t devote the time to exposing ourselves to the best of what is available.  We can learn from what is working and also from what is a train wreck, a shambles, a catastrophe.  Learning what not to do is also a valuable lesson and there are scores of instructors available in that regard.

We are all feeling pressed for time, but actually we have a lot of time.  If we take out working and sleeping, our available time for study is still sufficient, quite sufficient.  The choices we make determine how far we move forward.  Accepting that persuasion power is a fundamental requirement, you could argue a duty for people in business. If that is the case,  then we need to make the priority to access all of the available resources and work on improving our knowledge and understanding.

If we only watched one of the top speakers for an hour a week and took extensive notes and then referred to those notes before we contemplated making a speech, then we would be in the top 1% of presenters immediately.  This is only because most people don’t do anything and what they do do is pretty dull and awful. Presenting is the bastion of scoundrels for the most part, so devoting time to build the skills makes us stand above and apart from the rabble very quickly.

I am a hoarder.  I never throw anything out and this habit spills over into preparing for my presentations.  I always keep previous presentations and I plunder earlier slides for content I can use for the next one.  Topical content has a short shelf life but other content, particularly images, can be used for many years.  This is all well and good, however it does have one serious drawback and that is you face the dilemma of how much content to use and which content to select.  Having given 548 public speeches so far, you would think I would have this problem under control by now.  I am a glutton though for data and cool images and this sea of information gets harder and harder to swim through.

Invariably, I select way too many slides.  Trying to prune them though is tough, because we can fall in love with the quality of our research or our numbers.  The intentions are admirable.  We want to deliver the highest quality content to our audience and so the pruning shears are not being wielded vigorously enough.  Dropping out slides has a certain amount of pain attached to it, so the discipline to do it is definitely required.  We have to keep reminding ourselves of the time limit we face for the presentation.  We get caught up in the logistics of slide selection and other important aspects get missed. 

One of my pet peeves with presenters is when they have bitten off more than they can chew and the last 20 slides are raced through or skipped at the end, because they have messed up their time control. We feel cheated.  Here is some valuable information being whizzed through and we would like to know some more about these slides but we never will.  We are trading our time for value, yet due to the speaker’s ineptitude we are not getting the full value of the transaction.  So there are definitely brand damage elements to doing this and we should all avoid these every time.

Another casualty is we spend all the time on the slides and nothing on the rehearsal.  Here is the irony.  If we had spent some time in rehearsal we would have immediately realised we had too much material for the time allotted.  This happened to me when I did my TED talk.  I had prepared  eight chapters for that talk, but in rehearsal, I realised I had to axe the last chapter or risk trying to rush it all through.  One of the downsides of TED talks is that they are shown globally, basically forever.  If you make a mess of it then that knowledge isn’t limited to the 100 people in the room, as per a normal talk, it now goes out to millions who see what a dill you are.  So rushing it through would be a bad choice and cutting stuff out is the better option.

A lot of the time we are showing data, because we feel this is valuable information for the audience.  That means slide after slide of numbers, bar charts, pie charts, line graphs etc.  This can get very dull very quickly.  Also, we tend to not remember the tsunami of numbers either, so is there much point to doing it this way?  Being more selective on some key numbers would make more sense and help to cut down the pressure on time.  Rather than just relying on visuals to make the point, we can use storytelling as well to really drive home the relevance of the numbers.

Let me use an example of Voice Of Customer scores.  Say we are trying to highlight our positive reaction from our buyers for our product or service and we are referring to scores out of 100.  We could just show trend over time and make a comment about the direction of the trend.  Additionally, we could add in a story about the numbers.  If we had a number like 72% for the Voice of Customer score, on the face of it, that isn’t particularly remarkable.  We could make the comment that Japanese buyers are hard markers.  Or we could go further and tell a story about the luxury goods industry in Japan which has a permanent dilemma.  When buyers in Japan are surveyed on their happiness, the scores are substantially below similar surveys in the rest of the world.  The luxury goods companies initially thought they had a problem in Japan, but what they found was the scores for their firms’ products and services were consistently lower than other markets.  Ultimately, to make sense of the comparative scores they started adding in up to 30% additional scores to compensate for the Japanese buyer’s lower scoring scale.  So that miserable 72% score actually represented 93.6%, which was more in line with other surveys in other countries.

It takes more time to tell a story like that, rather than just show a number like 72%, but the story is memorable and people will remember that long after the talk is over.  So we have to allow time to wrap some numbers up in stories in our talks, which means we have to axe other slide darlings.  We are providing more value in this way, because the audience will recall the key points more easily and so the time trade off is definitely worth it.  So when you are thinking about creating your power collection of slides, stop right there.  Instead think about which slides lend themselves well to storytelling.  Absolutely do the rehearsal to be able to gauge how much time you have available to show the slides and tell the stories.  If you do that, then the whole presentation will accentuate your personal and professional brands.